Architettura Trumeau-Bar, designed by Gio Ponti and modified by Piero Fornasetti.

Piero Fornasetti is among Italy’s most fondly remembered 20th-century image makers and designers. He emblazoned furniture and objects with curious graphics, from provocative faces to colorful butterflies to reinterpreted classical elements, over more than half a century. Although he died in 1988, many of his creations have proven to have tremendous staying power and are still available today.

Piero Fornasetti drawing, in a bathtub he painted with a flock of butterflies.

However, even the most passionate collectors of Fornasetti’s work can’t possibly have seen his entire oeuvre—he designed an estimated 13,000 objects and decorative elements during his day. Beginning November 13, in celebration of the centenary of the designer’s birth, the Triennale Design Museum in Milan will reveal at least some of them in its exhibition “100 Years of Practical Madness.” This, the largest-ever exhibition of Fornasetti’s work, will offer up more than 1,000 of his most important designs, including numerous pieces never before presented to the public, which were pulled from his extensive archive.

Barnaba Fornasetti, Piero’s son and the present head of his father’s company, curated the show. “The problem for me was not choosing what to expose but what to exclude,” he says. “There are so many things in the archive that would be wonderful to show.” Nevertheless, he narrowed it down to a selection of objects that he hopes illustrate the full range of his father’s talent—“from small cuff links to big cabinets.” That includes fantastical sketches, furniture designed in collaboration with Gio Ponti, and numerous whimsical interpretations of the face of Lina Cavalieri, the Italian opera singer who was Fornasetti’s muse.

More importantly, Barnaba, who has been reinterpreting Piero’s designs to create new products in recent years, hopes the exhibition will also demonstrate that his father’s work continues to enjoy a life of its own. “I like to call this exhibition a retro-perspective—it’s not only a historical view of the man,” he says. “My father designed a kind of creative system that can still be used today and in the future. It’s a method of using images from the past, from all over the world, that are already stored in our brains, then reusing and recycling them in different ways while putting your own identity into it as well.”

A selection of Fornasetti's extensive range of tabletop objects.

It was Piero’s own pilfering of historical elements that gave his work its timelessness, Barnaba argues. “It’s something old-fashioned and very fashionable. It’s not modern or antique. It’s not surreal, but it is,” he says. “It’s everything and nothing at the same time.”